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I'm about 4 years into my career (mostly self-taught and learned-on-the-job), and I actually found Eskil's talk inspiring. The part that hit me hardest (in the good sense) was "don’t implement good-enough APIs."

As someone still figuring out my footing, I often feel pretty torn: should I train myself to always push for the cleanest (or near-perfect) design I can manage (as books like "The Pragmatic Programmer" and talks like this suggest), or is that just setting myself up for frustration in industry where pragmatism and deadlines usually win?

What worries me is exactly what some people here are saying – that "temporary" APIs usually last forever. I’ve already seen that on my team. So part of me wants to internalize Eskil's idealism early, even if it means clashing with more pragmatic coworkers.

For those of you with decades of experience: if you were mentoring someone at my stage, would you tell them to lean toward ideals (aiming high, then compromising when needed), or to embrace trade-offs and "good enough" thinking from the start?

I don't personally use AI for code completion inside my editor, however I do use ChatGPT like Google nowadays. Whenever I had a question in the early days, I just typed it into Google and scavenged through all the different links it gave me. Nowadays I just type it into ChatGPT (or any other LLM available for me at that moment) and see what it says.

I also try to use my brain to keep solving problems, but those sometimes seem like problems that are sometimes beyond the comprehension of LLMs (wicked questions, etc). For coding purposes, I consider ChatGPT a rubber duck and love to bounce ideas with it, but eventually I still end up refactoring whatever it is that it gave me.

In one of my previous companies, we had a separate project on GitHub (think of it as a Jira epic) where we collected various feedback after every release. Not to say we weren't expecting feedback outside of that time frame, but after every release is just when we received the most feedback.

Once the bigger wave of feedback came in, that project went through triage (usually by the project managers, etc), where every single point of feedback was given some sort of resolution (whether it's a bug we need to fix, a good feature request for the future, or something to not be done at least for now). Every single task had to get a resolution. After that, we had a filter where each of the tasks moved into their respective projects (bugs, features, etc) and we went on from there.

The company Linear [1] has pretty good systems built for triaging [2] for example. In another company, I was in a team with two other designers, who basically dumped all the feedback they received (or had the feedback be dumped) into triage and they reviewed it every once in a while.

[1] https://linear.app/

[2] https://linear.app/docs/triage

I _finally_ understand what I need to do with the `height` value in CSS now. I usually understood everything pretty well until the "final boss" part of the article. Everything makes so much more sense now, even the `height: 100%` for the root element(s).

Thanks for sharing!

Just a random idea, but if you were to hustle in the first few weeks of your job and leave a good impression, wouldn't that translate you to actually being expected to be a quick deliverer? At one point you may simply burn out due to this…

Some random advice would be to listen to Mr. Robot's soundtrack found here: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1xDNuLHKQHghKR9SmkR9pD?si=... – since the soundtrack is solely made to get people to understand the "hacker" POV, maybe it'll help you to become a hacker as well.

Sounds like a cool system, would love to break it! :-D

Actually, you talked about that every note doesn't need to be categorized – I think differently, however I think that it should work on a "tags" basis. If I grep a tag, i.e. #school over all the notes, I should find only those that are related to schoolwork.

Only the Air's do not have fans, the Pro ones do, as far as I know.

I have been using a Macbook Air M1 for the past year for development and here are a few of my tips:

1. Definitely don't go for the 8GB model for whatever you do (except for light web browsing), always go for the 16GB (or if you're heavily reliant on Docker, do heavy development and Adobe, as you said, go for 32GB). I have the 8GB model and Docker is painfully slow, the computer itself gets slow and it's overall very annoying.

2. On the topic of Docker: it has gotten much better over the time – at first, Docker was indeed painfully slow (I'm developing a Rails+React CMS, big pages took about a minute to load, now it's down to 5–10 seconds). I have read that running Docker through Parallels (if you're on M1) is much faster, but haven't got round to testing it.

3. The Air doesn't get noisy as it's fanless, however there have been occasions where it has become hot, but it doesn't happen very often.

Overall I think that if I had the choice, I'd go for the 14 inch Macbook Pro M1 Max. I have read that M2 Macbook Pro is kinda pointless, because as it might have a bit faster of a chip, the updated 14 inch Macbook has a new design, an HDMI port, an SD card slot etc.

I'm really scared about the fact that Apple might remove the charging port overall and just start using wireless chargers.

Honestly, knowing how to google things constantly seems like a mystery to people.

I often get people saying "how do you know all these things?" and just have to reply "I'm really good at googling."

I remember a thread a while ago on here, where the top reply was something along the lines of: "Every person is responsible for a handful documentation topics/threads/articles and whenever someone uses the documentation and finds that it's aged, they ping the person in charge of the article and their task is to either renew it or find out a solution to renew it."

That isn't exactly the answer to your question, but I believe it is a very good idea to live by.

As for my personal experience, we just ping a Slack channel whenever an article is old and has to be renewed. But we also don't have a very big company, which means not a lot of documentation articles to monitor.

Love it! It feels like a glorified RSS viewer, but with much more thought put into what people actually want to read and know on the 21st century. I would probably put much more thought and concentration into reading the news if I'd have a page like that with my own news feed that I usually read.

Good job!

I use Docker Desktop as well and when you don't have to run x64 containers through QEMU, the images work just fine. I have to run containers through QEMU at the moment and while it does indeed have a performance penalty, I honestly got used to it pretty quick. They are also dropping lots of experimental upgrades (some of which have worked pretty well in my case).

I agree with this answer – the Dell XPS machines are beasts and you might eventually even find yourself caring for the "fancy things", e.g. a touch screen.

To add to this list, I still think that Lenovo makes great and very customizable Thinkpads. As far as I know, the P15 is one of the popular ones. It's a chungus though, so if you need something lighter, the X1 Carbon is a great choice as well as it's very compact and portable.

A very tough question. I feel that it might be quite hard to lure a curious person into Computer Science, who doesn't know anything about the field yet.

One of the books I liked (since I actually studied Linguistics in my Bachelor's) and what drew me towards CS was "Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software" by Charles Petzold.

Professionally I keep switching between Chrome and Firefox (currently on Chrome) ony my Mac. Firefox has the source-code viewer, some nifty CSS stuff etc, while most of the services I use work better on Chrome. Unprofessionally I have always used Chrome and will probably continue using it (hence the "being used to" Chrome).

On my iPhone, I use Chrome as well. Never really got used to Safari.

Just my two cents on the topic, but I'm guessing that Instagram was never really mean't to be used on desktop – it was developed mobile-first and just ported to desktop when there was a bigger demand for it.

You could try out Voog (www.voog.com)! It is an Estonian company, but checks all your boxes.